


winter stops the dying

by Qzil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, F/M, Megstiel Week, Mild Sexual Content, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qzil/pseuds/Qzil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dead rise and the living fall around her, but Meg survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	winter stops the dying

Meg had hated winter as a child. She’d hated how it got dark early, hated the cold that seemed to soak right into her bones no matter how many layers she had on, hated how the animals would go into hiding and how her father wouldn’t let her play outdoors for more than half an hour at a time. She was a summer child, he’d told her, born for warmth and flowers and sunlight. 

But now, as an adult, Meg loved winter for one solitary reason. 

Zombies froze. 

For a few months, at least, she was free of the undead menace. 

Not that they were that dangerous, anyway. Not to her. The slow, decaying bodies of the reanimated posed no threat to her unless they were in large packs. She could easily take down three deadheads at once, perching in a tree and waiting for them to pass by before picking them off with an arrow.   
She had no memory of learning how to hunt, her father having begun teaching her as soon as she could walk, and she was grateful for the knowledge. 

Fresh caught food wasn’t safe, of course. Animals didn’t reanimate like humans did, but you could never tell what had been nibbling on the flesh of the undead, or what had been bitten by a human versus another animal, until you caught the fever and were on your way to being dead yourself. 

But winter meant a brief respite from the undead, at least in the north. In the south they were still there, moving and rotting and smelling up the place. Summer was the worst for her now. The zombies came to life again, forcing her back into her small hideout, keeping her trapped. 

She could always leave, she supposed, but didn’t know how far she’d get. It was better to wait it out. The officials on the radio said that the army was moving east from their stronghold in California, slowly clearing out the country. She didn’t entirely believe them, of course, but based on what she’d seen since the virus or supernatural thingamabob had started, there was only another year left of it, maybe two. 

Zombies rotted unusually fast in the summer, bloating and exploding and laying on the ground, wiggling, until their brains were crushed by some bystander or animal or falling hunk of rock. They were always dangerous, of course, once they went down. You wanted a zombie upright and walking, an easy target, compared to a dragger. 

But zombies froze in the winter, standing or falling in place and staying there until the spring sun warmed them and freed them from their snowy prison, like some sort of super-powerful bug. That was when the real threat started. 

But to Meg, winter was more than just a break from the hoards of the undead, or the occasional human traveler. Winter was life. Winter meant survival.   
When the dead had begun rising, she’d been home alone, her father out on patrol with his partner and her honorary uncle, Alistair. He’d called her at once, told her the combination to his gun safe, and told her to get upstairs and stay there with all the food and bottled water that she could.

He hadn’t come home. 

Meg wasn’t even sure what had happened to him. She’d searched for his face in every crowd she’d seen, in every zombie that she killed, but she hadn’t found him. 

He had, however, left her a plan. 

She’d hoarded all the food and water that she could, destroyed her stairs so nothing could follow her to the top floor of her house, and had holed up in the spacious master bedroom, the door barricaded. From there, she’d watched the chaos, watched as more and more zombies rose and overpowered the living as they tried to flee. Watched the dead eventually move on, watched new waves of the dead pass through, watched as the occasional human traveler walked or drove or biked down the road that was choked with corpses. 

She’d shot one or two of those as well. 

After a time she’d been starving, nearly out of food and water, when she’d woken up to snow and zombiecles. She’d spent a whole day watching the zombies in her street, waiting for them to move, smiling when they did not. 

After that it had been easy, to climb out onto her roof, leap onto the neighbor’s, and raid their home. She’d found bottled water and cans of food and even stale cookies and candies from the holidays. She’d found jackets in the closets and more blankets than she could ever need. She found furniture that she tossed over onto her roof to break up to use for firewood. There were medications in their bathroom cabinets and large pots in their blood stained kitchen that she could use to keep herself well or boil the snow into water. 

Best of all, she found a hand-cranked radio. 

Every day she’d moved farther and farther into winter’s harsh embrace, raiding homes around her for supplies and any trace of human life. She’d found plenty of the first, and none of the second. 

She was alone, but she was a survivor. 

.

It was easy now, to get across to her neighbor’s roof. The rope under her hands was slippery from the ice, but she’d had practice. One side looped around their chimney, the other end looped around hers, forming a small bridge for her to scoot across. Her empty backpack slid forward to bump against the back of her head as she did so, and she could feel her handgun pressing against her skin, the metal cold enough but bite, but she ignored them both. 

After that, she slipped through the broken window and ambled down the stairs. 

Winter was almost over, and while she was sure she had enough supplies to manage through until the next one, it was always good to have backups. Two of her water pots were filled with snow, ready to be boiled the next day at noon, when the weak sunlight offered more protection against anyone seeing the smoke, but it would be better to have a third to fill as well, to hurry the process along. Almost all of her empty bottles were filled. 

The grocery store had been picked clean long ago by others passing through, so Meg ignored it, walking past the decaying building and heading for the offices on the other side of the street. While they would not hold much, probably only rotted fruit and desk mints, it was worth a try. After that, the apartment complex behind it. 

She was right on the office building, finding only a few pens and some mints that would serve as a nice treat, but hit jackpot at the apartments. She shoved canned soup and fruit and vegetables into her backpack, stuffing it to the breaking point, and even found a small collection of Oreos in a tupperware container, protected from ants. In one apartment she found a huge collection of cat food, the cats nowhere to be seen, and took most of that, too. 

She’d eaten cat and dog food before, and it wasn’t so bad. Not when you were starving. 

Exiting the building, she began the long walk back to her home, shivering despite the layers that she wore. It would be another cold night. But a soft bed awaited her, piled with blankets, and she thought that she might treat herself to a sponge bath the next day. She couldn’t justify wasting water on a full bath, even while snow was plentiful, but a sponge bath with hot water would feel as close to Heaven as she could get. 

Hearing a noise behind her, Meg pulled her gun from her pocket and whirled around, preparing herself to shoot. 

A scared, blue-eyed boy stared back at her, hands raised. Meg cocked the gun and moved her finger to the trigger. 

She’d killed human before, men who had seen her out of her safehouse and tried to prey on her, and felt no guilt in it. She was doing what she had to in order to survive. 

The man in front of her was filthy, with a full beard that obscured the lower half of his face, and skinny under his heavy layers. His hands were trembling with exhaustion or hunger, and he looked terrified. 

“Please, don’t shoot,” he begged. Meg narrowed her eyes. 

“Are you following me? You won’t get anything. Turn around and leave and I won’t shoot you.”

“You’re the first human I’ve seen in a year,” the man told her. “I just…is there food? In there?”

“Probably. I didn’t get a chance to go through all the buildings.”

The man’s eyes lit up and he glanced toward the open door of the complex. She could hear his stomach rumble from where she was standing. Dropping her gun, she reached into her bag and extracted a can of catfood. 

“Here,” she said, tossing it to him. The man caught it, nearly dropped it, and then stared down at it like it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

“Thank you,” he choked. Meg thought she saw tears forming in his eyes. 

She hadn’t seen another human for nearly six months. The last one, a former schoolteacher from Maine, had been holed up in the house next door at one point. She’d told Meg that she was heading south, and had left the next day without saying goodbye. 

If she was being honest, the loneliness was catching up to her. In the last few months, she’d caught herself talking out loud to the knick knacks in her father’s bedroom, just to break the silence. 

“What’s your name?” she asked him. 

“Castiel,” he answered, shaking fingers struggling to open the lid of the can. 

Meg took it from him and pulled the lid off easily, watching in distaste as he dug into the half frozen food with his fingers. 

“I’m Meg,” she offered. “You need a wash.”

“Can’t,” he mumbled. “All the rivers are choked with zeds. It isn’t safe.”

“I have a place that’s safe. C’mon.”

He looked harmless, and so weak that a gust of strong wind would push him over, that she found herself letting her guard down. And if he tried anything, she could easily kill him and roll him off her roof. 

He followed her, jumping at every small noise and shadow, until she reached her rope bridge. He nearly fell twice and collapsed, trembling, onto her roof. She wondered how the hell he’d survived. Once they were inside, she stood in her father’s bedroom and ordered him to strip. 

“What?” he yelped, scandalized. 

“I need to make sure you’re not bitten,” she told him calmly, gun trained on his head, and he did as she asked, shivering. When she saw that he was clear, she offered to reciprocate, if only to give him peace of mind, but he refused. 

“A gentleman does not look upon a lady unclothed, unless he is her husband,” he told her. Meg raised her eyebrows at that, but offered him a bottle of water, kept lukewarm under piles of blankets, and some of her father’s old clothes. He accepted both happily, washing his face, and settled down against the wall. “Are these your husband’s?”

“I don’t have a husband,” she told him. “I’m only eighteen.”

“Where I come from that is the age to be married,” he informed her casually, sipping the bottle of water. 

“Were you part of some crazy compound?” she asked. 

“A religious way of living, yes,” he answered. Meg raised her eyebrows but let it go, and began inventorying and splitting up her supplies. He watched her the whole time, eyes moving over the food and blankets and bandages she’d acquired over the last two years. “You’ve survived well.”

She ignored him and moved for her radio, cranking it, and listened to the broadcasts. As usually there were the ones detailing where hoards had moved, instructions on how to properly store food and water to prevent it from spoiling, advice about making your own penicillin, and other useful bits that the people safe on the west coast sent out. 

Then the army news came on, and she saw Castiel perk up in his corner.   
They were nearing, the broadcast said, almost to the east coast. The zombie menace would be cleared out by next winter. It advised any survivors to stay where they were, if they could, and to stay safe. 

Meg turned the radio off and returned it to the closet. The sun began to set, signaling it was time for sleep. Still, she pulled one of her precious candles from the closet and lit it, curious about her new find. 

“Tell me about you,” she requested. “How did you survive?”

“My brothers and sisters and I were holed up in an apartment building. We’d left the compound shortly after the outbreak, you see, thinking of traveling south, like so many others did. But we didn’t make it before the first snowfall. We almost died of starvation that winter, living off whatever we could scrounge. There were others in the area, and they outnumbered us. Two of my sisters went over to them, and three of my brothers as well. Their group suffered an outbreak a week later, and the rest of my siblings and I cleared out after we put them down. After that, we continued moving south in the summer. The rest of my siblings either fell to the dead, or to illness,” he explained. 

“How many did you have?”

“There were twelve, including me.”

Meg whistled. She only had one older brother, and he had been living in California for college during the outbreak, and was presumably safe.

“I can see how you’ve survived,” Castiel continued. “You are very lucky, to have such a place.”

Meg didn’t say anything. She’d gotten lucky more times than she could count, over the last two years. She’d survived, which was more than she could say for the dead that roamed the streets. Without her father’s warning, she might have been one of them. 

“If I may be forward, may I spend the night?” he asked her. “It would be good, to rest without fear.”

“Sure,” she answered. She pulled some extra blankets out of the closet and threw them at him. “There’s a couch.”

He smiled at her, blue eyes glowing in the firelight. “Thank you.”

Meg blew out the candle, stripped out of her grimy outer layers of clothing, and slipped under the blankets. Her dark hair, greasy from going to long without a wash, stayed in place even as she pulled it from its ponytail. It needed a wash, too. 

She figured she could get that done in the morning, when Castiel left to continue his trip south. 

.

She had to shake him awake the next day, and found that he was burning with fever. 

“You’re wasting daylight,” she told him, uncaring. “You don’t wanna be out there at night.”

He groaned and turned away from her. Huffing, Meg wasted two of her precious pills on him, and forced water down his gullet, keeping watch until they worked and he opened his eyes. 

“Meg?”

“You better not get me sick,” she warned. “I’ll kill you. I really will.”

It was days before the fever subsided. Castiel stayed on her couch, rising only to use the waste bucket she kept in the other room. She had one for liquids and one for solids, but apparently he couldn’t tell which was which, resulting in her having to boil more snow to clean them. Starting a fire on her father’s small balcony was always risky, but almost always worth it. 

But after that incident, she had to fight against the instinct to throw him off of it. He was probably a goner, anyway. A goner from a real fever, instead of the fever that took hold when you were bitten by the undead. 

He talked a lot, seeing things that weren’t there. He talked to his sisters, his brothers, his mother. He talked to some girl named April who he was apparently supposed to marry, but had been infected. He talked about nieces and nephews and other people that he had seen bitten. He quoted the bible, said he was being punished, that they were all being punished for their sins. 

Meg ignored most of it and read from the small collection of books her father had. He seemed calmest during Grimm’s fairytales. 

She left him a few times to scavenge, preparing for the summer. Stockpiling food and more medicine and bandages, making arrows for her bow since guns were dangerous to use, the sound drawing more and more of the dead. Something in her told her that he would be staying with her during the warmer months. It was too dangerous to travel then, with the dead roaming. 

She was right. 

His fever broke as the thaw came. And with it came the dead. 

.

He was useful, in his own way. He could shoot a bow and arrow as well as she could, taking out the dead that passed by their hideout, and knew interesting stories. 

Summer, which had once been a time of beaches and fun, had turned into a time of waiting. Waiting for the snow, for the dead to freeze, to be rescued. She wondered if humanity would ever enjoy beaches again, or if the dead had claimed the water. 

But for once, the waiting wasn’t unbearable. Castiel entertained her with stories from his childhood, or they took turns reading from her father’s small book collection, Castiel fascinated. He told her that the only books allowed in his home had been the bible. Each story was new to him, from fairytales to the books she’d read in high school, before the dead rose and high school no longer existed. 

The putrid smell of rotting corpses permeated the air, bringing the potential for sickness. He helped her hang netting over the holes in the walls and the windows to keep mosquitoes out. After a time, he no longer hid his eyes when she stripped down to small shorts and tank tops as a defense against the heat, and even joined her, lying on their backs on the wooden floor with their eyes closed, conserving energy. 

The radio said that the army was steadily making its way east, busy clearing out the swamps and forests in the south. Liberation was near. 

He was attractive, under all the layers of grime and dust, if too skinny. But everyone was skinny these days. 

And it was nice, not to be alone, to have a partner during the shared days of horror. As spring turned to summer and there were more of the dead roaming the streets, Meg found herself forgetting what it was like without him there. It was nice to have another person to talk to, another person to share work with. She’d read about things like that in books when she was younger, that two people bonded when they shared a traumatic experience, or had to work together to survive. She’d always thought it was bullshit until he’d joined her. 

The first time she’d tried to kiss him, he’d pushed her away, claiming that it was wrong. They weren’t wed, and hadn’t courted. 

She’d reminded him that it was the apocalypse, and rules could be thrown out. 

They couldn’t have sex, of course. She couldn’t risk a pregnancy, not where they were, and condoms were something that she’d never thought to grab in all her expeditions. Castiel wouldn’t hear of it, anyway. Not without a ring on her finger. 

Still, it was better than nothing. It didn’t matter that they were filthy, covered with grime and sweat and ash. During those few moments with his head between her legs and fingers inside of her, she forgot about the dying world outside, the dimming hope of rescue, and the imminent threat of death waiting on the ground. 

Summer was waning and the army had not come. It seemed impossible that they ever would. She would die here, in her childhood home, despite her careful rationing and store of supplies. The dead would break in some day, or she would be caught, or die of illness.

Castiel discarded the idea, and prayed nightly. 

. 

Fall was nearing its end when he lit one of her precious candles and settled beside her in the bed, having given up sleeping separately long ago. Fishing into his old coat, he pulled out a pocket bible and opened it, revealing a ring trapped between the pages. 

“When this is over, we will wed,” he told her. “We will share all of each other, and build a life.”

She hadn’t had the heart to tell him that they probably wouldn’t. She’d accepted the ring, and he’d held her through the night. Winter was coming, and she felt it in her bones that she would not be at the house when the first snowfall blanketed the land. 

.

It was late fall when he suggested an outing. Their supplies were running low, and the dead were thinning, and it would not be dangerous. 

It was, of course. 

The dead were slow and shambling, rotting before her eyes, but they were everywhere. After a walking less than a block and finding only two tins of catfood in her neighbor’s dusty cabinets, Castiel admitted that it had been a bad idea, and they’d started for home. 

A dragger had been the roof of the house next door, having somehow made it out the window, and caught him just as he was scooting across the rope. They screamed together as it bit into his ankle, Meg pulling him onto her roof at the same time that the dragger fell, nearly taking Castiel with it. 

But he was bitten. Infected. Dying. 

Still, she dragged him inside and laid him on her bed, taking care not to touch the jagged wound while Castiel moaned in pain. She fingered her gun, debating on giving him a quick death and drawing more zombies to them, or finding another way to end his life. 

Deciding, she walked into her room and found her childhood bat from baseball. 

She sat with him through the night, waiting for him to die as the fever took hold. He tossed in their bed, babbling once again to people who weren’t there, clutching her hand like a lifeline. She swallowed hard and tried not to feel anything. 

Then the sun rose, and he went. Meg knew she only had a few minutes before he rose again, hungry for flesh. She reached into his coat and took his pocket bible, set it on the bedside table, and raised the bat over her head.

Blood coated her face when she was finished. Meg wiped it off with her sleeve and dropped the bat onto the floor, uncaring. She slipped the bible into her pocket and climbed onto the roof, numb, her gun in her pocket. 

She would have to go back in eventually, she knew, to clear out his body before it started to stink and flies invaded. Her mind tried to work it logically. It was necessary. He was dead. He would have risen and killed her, too. She would have more food for the winter. She would no longer have to share her space. 

She would be alone again. 

Meg closed her eyes and rested them on her knees. All around her the dead moaned. 

She raised her head when a gunshot sang through the air. Standing on trembling legs, she looked into the distance and saw them. 

Tanks. Men in camouflage and gas masks. 

Rescue. 

They neared her street, shouting for survivors, taking out the dead. 

Silent, she raised her gun and fired. Faces turned toward her. Men shouted and scrambled toward the building. A dog sprung out of a vehicle and ran for her, yipping happily. Some men set up a sort of net below her, and encouraged her to jump. 

Patting her pocket to make sure Castiel’s bible was in place, she did. The men caught her, asked if there was anyone else up there, and made the dog sniff her to make sure that she was uninfected. They congratulated her on her survival.

She allowed them to help her into a car, and went without looking back at the house. Castiel’s blood still stained her sleeve. 

She closed her eyes, and for the first time in her life, she prayed. For her father. For his sisters and brothers. For her own brother. And for him. 

Especially for him.  


End file.
